Tacofino: How A Tofino Surf-Lot Taco Truck Became Vancouver's Pacific Northwest Taco Brand
Kaeli Robinsong and Jason Sussman started Tacofino in a single orange truck in a Tofino surf parking lot in 2009. Seventeen years later, the Vancouver footprint runs from Gastown to Burnaby — and the truck is still parked in Tofino.
May 3, 2026 · By Justin Plosz · Vancouver, British Columbia · Business · 10 min read
The Quick Picture
Tacofino is, in 2026, one of the most recognisable food brands to have come out of British Columbia's West Coast in the past two decades. The company was founded in 2009 by Kaeli Robinsong and Jason Sussman, who set up an orange canteen-style food truck in the Live to Surf parking lot on the Pacific Rim Highway just outside Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The truck served a short menu of fish tacos, burritos, and a tuna ta'taki rice bowl, with a hand-bottled chipotle mayo as the canonical condiment.
The truck became a cult Vancouver Island stop almost immediately. Surfers from the lot, summer visitors driving the Pacific Rim Highway, and Tofino-area residents made it a fixed part of the West Coast routine. By 2012, demand had pulled the company onto the mainland, and Tacofino opened its first Vancouver location — the Tacofino Burrito Bar in Gastown — in a small Cordova Street storefront. From there, the company expanded steadily across Metro Vancouver and into Victoria.
In 2026, Tacofino operates a portfolio of restaurants — quick-service burrito bars, full-service sit-down rooms, and the original food truck itself, which still runs every season in Tofino. The brand also runs a retail bottled-sauce program, a catering business, and a wholesale program that supplies independent grocers and food-service buyers across BC. The founding ownership team is still in operational control.
The Tofino Origin Is The Brand
Most fast-casual taco brands in North America are built on a generic Mexican aesthetic and an American supply chain. Tacofino is not. The company's identity is anchored on a single specific place — the West Coast of Vancouver Island — and on the specific moment in BC food culture that produced it.
The truck arrived in Tofino during a particular cultural window. Tofino had become, in the late 2000s, a destination surf town with a young Canadian visitor demographic that wanted West Coast food served the way West Coast food was actually being eaten by the people who lived there: fresh fish, casual format, big flavours, no fuss. Tacofino built directly into that demand. The fish was local. The format was a truck in a parking lot. The flavours leaned Pacific-Mexican rather than Tex-Mex. The customer base was as likely to be wet-suited surfers walking back from the beach as it was to be summer road-trippers from Vancouver.
When the company expanded onto the mainland, it brought that origin with it as the brand. Vancouver-location murals and interiors lean explicitly into West Coast-surf-and-forest visual language. Bottle labels and menus reference Tofino. The original truck is the brand's documentary fact, not a marketing concept. This is unusually disciplined for a Canadian fast-casual operator that has scaled into a multi-location brand, and it is one of the harder-to-replicate elements of Tacofino's competitive position.
The Menu
Tacofino's menu has evolved across seventeen years and across multiple location formats, but the core set of dishes the company is best known for has remained consistent.
The canonical Tacofino orders, across most locations, are: fish tacos (cornmeal-crusted Pacific cod or rockfish, slaw, lime crema, in a soft tortilla); the tuna ta'taki rice bowl (seared albacore, brown rice, ginger, soy, sesame, the Tacofino take on a Pacific bowl); the chicken or pork burrito (the volume product across the burrito bars); and the chipotle mayo, which started life as a bottled-on-the-truck condiment and is now a retail product in BC grocery shelves. Most locations also run rotating specials and house-made sodas.
The menu is tighter than a typical Mexican-American chain by design. The kitchen does fewer things and does them more reliably; the ingredient pipeline is consequently easier to manage. This is the kind of decision a chef-led independent operator makes that a private-equity-owned chain typically does not, and it is part of why Tacofino's dishes have travelled across multiple locations without quality drift. Most Vancouverites can walk into any Tacofino location, order their canonical dish blindly, and recognise the kitchen on the plate.
The Vancouver Footprint
Tacofino's Vancouver footprint is structured around three different format choices. The Tacofino Burrito Bar in Gastown — the original 2012 mainland location — is a quick-service burrito-and-tacos counter with a small dining room. Tacofino Yaletown is a full-service sit-down restaurant with a cocktail bar, a longer menu, and the kind of atmosphere that handles a Yaletown after-work shift. Tacofino Burrard sits between the two formats, serving as a downtown lunch-and-dinner anchor. Tacofino Ocho on Main Street is the most ambitious of the Vancouver expansion — a larger sit-down room with a substantially longer menu and full bar — and reads as the company's chef-led restaurant rather than as a fast-casual outpost.
The portfolio's spread across formats is intentional. A single concept replicated across every neighbourhood is fragile; the format-by-neighbourhood approach lets the same brand serve different customer needs without forcing every location into the same operational box. A weekend-morning Gastown visitor and a Wednesday-evening Yaletown sit-down diner are buying different products from the same kitchen. Tacofino's discipline is in keeping the food coherent across all of those contexts.
The company also operates locations in Victoria and continues to run the Tofino canteen truck every season. The full and current list of restaurants is at tacofino.com.
The Bottled-Sauce And Wholesale Program
The single most successful product extension in Tacofino's history is the bottled chipotle mayo. The condiment started on the truck in Tofino, made in small batches by hand and packaged for sale in plain bottles to customers asking to take it home. It is now a retail product distributed across British Columbia in independent grocers and select chain locations.
The bottled program has expanded to include several other Tacofino sauces, with the chipotle mayo as the volume anchor. For Vancouver and Victoria customers who first encountered the sauce inside one of the restaurants and wanted to keep it in the fridge at home, the retail line is the answer; for grocers, the line provides a recognisable BC-origin condiment with a built-in customer base that the bottle did not have to manufacture.
The wholesale and food-service program supplies independent food-service buyers and grocers across BC with both bottled product and select kitchen items. The retail and wholesale programs together amount to a meaningful secondary channel beyond the restaurants — a non-trivial revenue base that does not depend on dining-room foot traffic, which is the kind of business diversification that helped multiple BC restaurant operators survive the 2020 — 2022 disruption period.
The Catering And Events Program
The third Tacofino business is catering. The company runs a dedicated catering program that supplies weddings, corporate events, festivals, and private functions across Metro Vancouver and the Lower Mainland. The catering kit is built around the brand's core menu and around the truck format: tacos and burritos served from a portable counter or, for outdoor events, a Tacofino-branded truck deployment.
For Vancouver event planners, the catering program functions as the on-brand BC food choice for events that want to feel specifically West Coast rather than generically Mexican. A Tacofino taco bar at a Vancouver wedding does work that a generic taco caterer cannot do — it places the food culturally as well as gastronomically.
The catering program is documented at tacofino.com/catering and is a meaningful share of the company's non-restaurant revenue, particularly during peak summer months when outdoor-event volume across BC is at its highest.
The PRC Editorial View
Tacofino is, in 2026, one of the more disciplined examples of a Canadian independent food brand scaling without losing its origin. The truck still runs in Tofino. The Vancouver locations look and read like Vancouver locations of a Tofino brand, not like generic chain restaurants pretending to have a story. The menu has stayed coherent across seventeen years and multiple format changes. The bottled-sauce line is genuinely good and has earned its way onto BC grocery shelves on the strength of the product, not just the brand. The catering program is consistent with everything else.
This is, in 2026 Canadian fast-casual context, an unusually intact operator. Most of the brands that started in the same window have either sold to private equity, scaled too fast and contracted, or migrated to a generic chain identity that lost the regional anchor. Tacofino did none of those things, which is the part of the story that matters editorially.
For Vancouver visitors and residents, the practical version of all of this is short. Walk into any Tacofino location, order a fish taco and a tuna bowl, take home a bottle of chipotle mayo, and try not to make it a Friday-night habit. Most Vancouverites, eventually, do.
Key takeaways
- Tacofino was founded in 2009 in Tofino, BC, by Kaeli Robinsong and Jason Sussman as a single orange canteen-style food truck in the Live to Surf parking lot.
- The original truck still operates seasonally in the same Tofino parking lot — the documentary origin of the brand.
- The company expanded into Vancouver from 2012 onward, starting with the Tacofino Burrito Bar in Gastown, and now operates multiple Metro Vancouver locations including Tacofino Yaletown, Tacofino Burrard, and Tacofino Ocho on Main Street, plus locations in Victoria.
- Canonical menu items are the cornmeal-crusted fish tacos, the tuna ta'taki rice bowl, the chicken/pork burrito, and the bottled chipotle mayo.
- The bottled chipotle mayo line is sold across BC through independent grocers and select chain locations as a standalone retail product.
- Tacofino runs a catering program for Lower Mainland weddings, corporate events, and festivals.
- The company has remained independently owned and operationally controlled by the founding team — increasingly unusual for a Canadian fast-casual brand of its scale.
Frequently asked questions
- Where did Tacofino start?
- Tacofino was founded in 2009 in Tofino, BC, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The original location was a small orange canteen-style food truck in the parking lot of the Live to Surf surf shop on the Pacific Rim Highway just outside town. The truck still operates seasonally in the same parking lot.
- Who owns Tacofino?
- Tacofino was founded in 2009 by Kaeli Robinsong and Jason Sussman, who remain in operational control of the company. The business has stayed independently owned through its expansion across British Columbia, with no acquisition by a multinational chain or private-equity restructuring.
- How many Vancouver locations does Tacofino have?
- Tacofino operates several Vancouver-area locations across multiple formats, including the original Tacofino Burrito Bar in Gastown (a quick-service counter), Tacofino Yaletown (a full-service sit-down restaurant), Tacofino Burrard (a downtown lunch-and-dinner room), and Tacofino Ocho on Main Street (the brand's largest sit-down restaurant). The full and current list is at tacofino.com.
- What's the most-ordered dish at Tacofino?
- The canonical orders are the fish tacos (cornmeal-crusted Pacific cod or rockfish with slaw, lime crema, and the Tacofino chipotle mayo), the tuna ta'taki rice bowl (seared albacore on brown rice with ginger, soy, and sesame), and the chicken or pork burrito. The chipotle mayo is so consistently part of the experience that it has become a retail product on its own.
- Can I buy the chipotle mayo in stores?
- Yes. Tacofino's bottled chipotle mayo — and several other Tacofino sauces — are distributed across British Columbia through independent grocers and select chain locations. The retail line started as the bottled condiment customers were asking to take home from the original Tofino truck.
- Does Tacofino do catering?
- Yes. Tacofino operates a dedicated catering program for weddings, corporate events, festivals, and private functions across Metro Vancouver and the Lower Mainland. The catering kit is based on the brand's core menu and is documented at tacofino.com/catering.
- Is the original Tofino truck still operating?
- Yes. The original Tacofino canteen truck still runs every season in the Live to Surf parking lot on the Pacific Rim Highway just outside Tofino. The truck is the documentary origin of the brand and is, for many Tacofino regulars, the most thematically meaningful place to eat the food.
- Are Tacofino's Victoria locations the same brand?
- Yes. Tacofino operates locations in Victoria as well as in Metro Vancouver. They are the same company, run by the same operating team, and serve the same core menu as the Vancouver and Tofino locations.
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